President Obama talks about settlements being a problem and he talks about Palestinian “aspirations” today, but he has never condemns Israeli violence against Palestinians the way he condemns Palestinian terror. This is the safe, acceptable mainstream way of saying you favor a two state solution without crossing a line. The line is this–Israel gets to use violence and Palestinians don’t, that’s the unspoken rule, and that explains why Obama says Israel has a “right, even an obligation to defend itself” when he would never use such words about Palestinians.

Every moment of Neera Tanden’s conversation with Benjamin Netanyahu at the Democratic Party thinktank, the Center for American Progress, was scripted; the audience looked like it was drugged and Tanden was a supplicant to the PM. The need for a show-conversation demonstrates that the Israel lobby is losing power, as progressive Americans get the story.

A 24-year old woman named Rasha Ahmad Hamed ‘Oweissi was killed by Israeli troops Monday morning at a military checkpoint near Qalqiliya in the West Bank when she approached the checkpoint from afar, holding a knife in her hand and a suicide letter in her bag. Eyewitnesses report that she did not pose a threat at anytime. She was simply standing, holding a knife, waiting for the soldiers to shoot her. She is the 80th person to be killed by Israeli forces since October 1st.

Oberlin College’s Investment Office has rejected a proposal submitted by the campus club, Students for a Free Palestine, calling on the college to drop holdings in a number of corporations involved in Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories. Though Oberlin’s Student Senate passed a divestment resolution submitted by Students for a Free Palestine in May 2013, the Board’s rejection of SFP’s divestment proposal indicates a watershed moment for campus-based BDS movements across the country: it represents what can happen when symbolic divestment resolutions are met with supposedly amenable college administrative frameworks.

Hebron’s Old City is subject to dramatic new restrictions introduced last week. 50 families who live in Tel Rumeida had a mere few days to register their name and ID card to the Israeli authorities and they will have to undergo rigorous security searches every time they wish to leave or enter their homes. According to one resident, “They told me I have the number 36 [on the list with who’s allowed to go in and out], it’s just like in prison. They try to make you a number, you’re not a person”.

Amnesty International USA Executive Director Steven Hawkins sent a letter to Center for American Progress President Neera Tanden suggesting questions she ask Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu including, “Why is Israel engaging in unlawful killings of Palestinian civilians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories?”

In speech to American Enterprise Institute last night, Benjamin Netanyahu said that Saddam was a “neighborhood bully” who had only “regional” effects, not “wedded to a larger goal.” But in 2002 he testified to Congress that Saddam put “our entire world at risk.”

The Egyptian government has destroyed 80% of the tunnels bringing goods into Gaza which has led to an environmental and economic disaster. “They are waging a tireless war on our livelihoods. I wonder what harms them when the Palestinian citizen in Gaza is able to feed his family by what he earns in meager wages from the tunnels work?” asks 24-year-old Adham Okbi.

“I just want to know what right you think you have to smear me as an anti-Semite and as a self-hating Jew,” Rob Bryan challenges an anti-BDS gathering in the New York synagogue where he was bar mitzvah’d

Neera Tanden, president of Center for American Progress, who is hosting Israeli PM Netanyahu today, once scoffed at Peace Now’s defense of her own employees even as she reached out to the rightwing groups that were attacking them